Comment by hintymad

How much does salary contribute to the overall cost of operating TSMC? Perplexity said that the average salary of a TSMC employee is $76K a year, and TSMC had about 80K people. So it cost them around $6B a year on salary. In the meantime, their operational cost was about $46B a year, so that's 13%. TSMC shipped about 16 million 12-in wafers. Each 12-inch wafer can make about 300 to 400 chips. Let's say 200 to stay on the conservative side. That will be 3.2B chips a year. That means the cost per chip on salary will be less than $2 a year. It looks HC cost is not that dominant?